ANNOUNCING “They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free”, the internet search giant waded into internet telephony.

A plan to raise up to $4 billion on the stockmarket from a company that has nearly $3 billion in cash had already prompted speculation on Google’s ambitions.

Among ideas reportedly considered by Google was building a “space elevator” to transport people into orbit by means of a 38,000km conveyor belt.

When the company created Google Talk, which lets users make voice calls over the internet, analysts surmised that it wanted to take over the world.

Brian Lent, the president of Medio Systems, a technology start-up, told The New York Times: “Google is the new evil empire . . . they have potential monopolistic control over access to information.”

Google, of course, operates under the motto “Don’t be evil”.

www.google.com

www.spaceelevator.com

www.nyt.com

Poised for flight

The closest Ashes Test match in history and the prospect of an England series victory over Australia have drawn record levels of visitors to cricket websites.

The now famous Edgbaston Test, which went to the wire before England emerged victorious, helped the English and Wales Cricket Board site, ecb.co.uk, to record a fourfold increase in page impressions in August to 13 million.

The question now is: have the Aussies lost heart? Hitwise, the internet research figures, uncovered figures suggesting that some Australians, sensing that their team may not retain the Ashes, were considering making the long journey home. Searches for the Australian airline Qantas have “skyrocketed” since the beginning of the Ashes series, Hitwise said, rising by more than 50 per cent in recent weeks.

www.ecb.co.uk

www.timesonline.co.uk/ashes

www.hitwise.com

www.qantas.com

Believe it or not

The stakes are rising over what young Americans are taught about the origins of life. When the Kansas School Board decided to teach intelligent design, a system that dismisses Darwin’s theory of evolution, Bobby Henderson, a blogger, claimed that the Universe was created by an intelligent “Flying Spaghetti Monster”. More than ten million people have visited the site and “Pastafarianism” has taken off. When the Boing Boing site picked up the story it was inundated by messages from creationists, one of whom referred to a $25,000 online challenge “to anyone who can give any empirical evidence for evolution”. Boing Boing offered to pay $250,000 for empirical evidence that Jesus is not the son of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

www.boingboing.com

www.drdino.com

www.venganza.org

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